Passing the Smell Test

 

I thought I had COVID last week. My little dog, Ollie, and I sat down like we do most mornings to meditate, pray, and journal together. Buddy comes, too; he usually sits with us for just a few minutes before wandering off for some alone time. But Ollie lies right next to me in the big, comfy chair until meditation time with Oprah ends and he hears me say, “Namaste,” at which time he will sit up, stretch his little neck, and hop off the chair. Look how cute.

My quiet mornings with my sweet dogs and a cup of coffee are some of my favorite things in the whole world. My sister also bought me a Nespresso Aeroccino milk frother for Christmas this year which turns my Barista Style Oatley into a sweet crown of Heaven atop my perfect cup of Good Morning Sunshine.

But this day, as I sat down and took my first sip of coffee, it tasted like water. DO I HAVE COVID? I whiffed it deeply. Does it smell like coffee? Or have I been smelling it already so I can’t smell it? I worked myself into a panic fairly quickly. Am I feverish? Or is that a hot flash? Does my head hurt? Maybe it hurts! Ohmygosh, it TOTALLY HURTS! How about my throat? *cough* Is that a new or worsening cough?? Can I breathe?? I CAN’T BREATHE!

I sniffed the coffee again, but I definitely couldn’t smell it. What else is smellable? I looked at my sweet Ollie lying next to me getting ready for meditation time and took a deep whiff.

Ollie has a certain smell. He doesn’t smell like a dog. Ollie has kind of a mild sweet and fluffy smell. I sniffed the top of his head, but still wasn’t certain of my COVID diagnosis, so I picked up one of his little paws and sniffed. You see, Ollie’s paws smell like popcorn.

I learned this about a year after Ollie arrived at our house. Chris was sitting with Ollie on the sofa and sniffing his little paws. This was not unusual behavior for Chris. Chris and my little brother smell things, like they pick up things and sniff them and then put them back down. If I hadn’t grown up watching my brother sniff random things, I might think there was something not-quite-right about my second son.

Knickknacks from other people’s houses, specific rocks (not all rocks, of course!), pieces of paper. One of these days, I’m going to delve deeper into how these guys deem an item sniff-worthy. It’s not like they are just picking up things to sniff all day long. That would be weird.

So Chris and Ollie are having an intimate moment on the couch and it made me laugh. They looked so cute, and it reminded me of the way I used to sit with Chris and smell his fat, little baby feet. Then Chris said, “Ollie’s feet smell like popcorn.”

I considered that Chris might be trying to trick me, but it turns out to be totally true. Our little dog has popcorn feet. Know what else? At least a half dozen of my friends confirmed that THEIR dogs’ paws also smell like popcorn, Doritos, or Fritos.

"My friends always said doggy paws smell like Doritos. haha so weird"

"My son told me this, too."

"I think Fritos lol"

"So the secret ingredient in popcorn or Doritos is....Doggy toe jam?" 

"Kirk always says Tani's feet smell like Fritos."

"I was noticing just last night that Chloe smelled like Doritos. No joke."

 

In our meditation chair, Ollie’s little foot smelled exactly like a movie theater, so I was pretty confident that I didn’t have COVID.

When Albert got home later that evening, he asked, “Did the coffee taste OK this morning?”

You see, Albert had an early meeting that morning, so he poured himself a to-go cup of coffee before it had finished brewing. “It was SO STRONG, so I worried that the coffee might not have tasted very good for you.”

I hope your dog’s feet smell like something delicious AND that you don’t have COVID.

Thank you for reading!

Ice Ice Baby

 

Well, THAT was quite a winter storm! The ice storm started on Thursday and we are finally thawing out today on Monday. If knowledge is power, I was a dum-dum for just a couple of days, and we couldn’t get our car out of our driveway for a couple more. It got pretty chilly in the house, but mostly I’m feeling pretty relaxed and extremely grateful. We had water. We had gas.

Well, my friends, we all know that when you live at our house, we always have gas.

It’s just Albert and me and the two little doggos at home now, so we all just snuggled up and did what we could with the lanterns that my Boy Scout husband always has prepared. We’re seasoned Oregonians now, so we know how to boil water and make pour-over coffee, and basically that’s about all you really need to have a pretty good day. We scrounged food that we could cook on the stove. We ate Boom Pop and Kettle Chips. We took lots of naps. No bigs.

Compare this to Arctic Blast of 2008 when my kids were 8, 9, and 11 with school shut down for weeks before Christmas break. This sounds like a legit ClubMed vacation compared to pandemic standards. I cannot tell you how many times each day I raise up my thanks to God that I do not have small children….or large children….or any children at home right now. The Lord knows me and understands that this would ruin me. I barely made it out of 2008, but you'd never know it by these pictures I dug up.

This is Albert heading off to work. He's walking down to the car that he  parked down at the bottom of the hill. He will drive this car a couple of miles to Safeway where he will park and catch the bus that will take him up, up, up the windy, icy hills of Portland to the VA Medical Center. Look at all that black hair and energy!

There was MUCH more snow back then. I think that well over a foot dropped down. The kids and I spent a lot of time outside burning off The Wiggles.

Chris’s kindergarten teacher told us about a trip she took to Sweden where they learned how to make igloos by piling up snow, dousing it with water, then digging out the middle. So we gave it a try and this is what we came up with.

Pretty neat, huh? We had tried making an igloo with bricks that we shaped from empty tubs of baby wipes. After a lot of work, we ended up with quite an impressive large, circular wall, but we couldn’t figure out how to make it into an igloo shape without it caving in.

There were also enough days and enough snow to make a good-sized snowman that lived on our driveway for about a week.

We spent a lot of time outside sledding on the hill on our street. There was enough snow to make a jump in the middle of the street. We yelled at anyone driving down the street, “DON’T WRECK THE JUMP!” We even created banks in front of the brick mailboxes that line the road to avert serious brain damage. I suppose we could have strapped on some bike helmets, but I didn’t think of that until just right now.

This year’s storm brought a lot of tree damage all over town. While it caused some anxiety to have giant hunks of ice and branches falling on the house, it looks like our roof is just fine. Here are some of the chunks Albert picked up from the yard today.

And also notice his poor, injured thumb. Some of my friends had no power all weekend and are still without power. Some of my friends have electric water pumps so they also don’t have water. Some of my friends have fancy electric toilets, so they also can’t go poop. That’s stressful.

I’ll leave you with a little video clip from this morning when the sun came out and all the ice started melting off the trees. This went on for a couple of hours, and there were thuds on our roof that shook the whole house.

We wouldn’t let the poor dogs outside for fear that they would be ice bombed. One time after a hail storm I went outside to survey the yard and a dead squirrel rolled right off the roof. What a gross way to die.

Since I don’t want to end on such a morbid note, and I’m not sure what else to talk about besides squirrels now that we got here somehow, I’d like to share another video with you that I captured while sitting at my kitchen table. These two little squirrels were playing on our deck when one of the little squirrel friends met a hilarious end.

I hope your creature comforts are returned soon if they aren’t already. Thank you for reading, my friends!

That's a Cut!

 

Albert and I visited the local Asian grocery store Friday night to pick up poke. Our plan was to make a pot of sushi rice and a little side salad and enjoy an easy, delicious dinner together. Seems like a legit, empty-nester date night amiright??

Albert took the Romaine out of the fridge and was chopping for about thirty seconds, when I heard, “OW.” Albert had just added the secret ingredient to his Jeffrey Dahmer Salad. He had cut off the tip of his thumb and made the WORST SALAD EVER.

Holy smokes, there was SO. MUCH. BLOOD. You see, there is a tiny arteriole near the tip of your thumb, which is why you can feel your pulse there. Go ahead. I’ll wait while you try it.

Yeah, I couldn’t feel it either. But I know it’s there, and sometimes you can feel it apparently. So Albert’s thumb was gushing and dripping blood BUT I DIDN’T PANIC! You see, this same thing happened to me almost exactly 10 years ago at the end of January 2011 while I was making salad. Whenever I get frustrated with Albert, something weird like this happens to let me know that we are definitely meant to experience this life on Earth together.

I had been chopping up some leftover green beans to toss into our dinner salad when SNIP! The tip of my thumb AND a sliver of my fingernail were no longer attached to my body. It happened so fast that it didn’t even hurt. Our dinner salad had just morphed into thumb-thing completely inedible.

Albert and the kids were outside, and they were surprised to come in to see me holding my hand in a paper towel and the counter besprinkled with vegetables and blood. I bled through towel after towel trying to stop the flow, but my wounded digit wouldn’t stop gushing. Albert finally helped me pile on a giant wad of gauze and wrap my thumb up tight before we went to bed.

The next morning, the kids in my Sunday School class prayed for my bulbous, throbbing thumb. That afternoon, I wanted to inspect the damage and change the dressing, but the gauze was melded to my skin. Albert tried helping me soak and pry it off gently, but it hurt so much that I started sweating and thought I might throw up or faint.

I visited my doctor Monday morning and we had a giggle about how everyone says veggies are so good for you, but what the hell do they know?? After giving me a just-in-case tetanus shot, she soaked my flat-headed thumb in some warm water and Hibiclens for a while, then was able to remove all but that last thready layer of gauze.

The human body really is a miracle. Over the course of just a couple of days, my skin had begun to heal and incorporated some of the gauze into new layers of tissue. My doctor offered me a little lidocaine, but that seemed like way too much trouble. PLUS the thought of getting a SHOT into the tip of my already-pretty-sore thumb made me squirm. I have experienced HOURS birthing three babies without pain medication. I could certainly bear one more second of discomfort.

So I was more than ready for Albert’s emergency. I bound his thumb up, making sure to place a generous dollop of Neosporin between his stumpy thumb and wad of gauze. Albert wanted the bandage REALLY tight in order to stop the bleeding. We all know now a tourniquet is essentially warranted to stop blood from pulsing out of that arteriole. Of course, this didn’t feel very good, and Albert got up in the middle of the night to loosen the bandage, allowing blood to start seeping again.

That next morning, I offered my still-actively-bleeding husband to create that beautiful, bulbous wad of gauze that worked so well for me ten years ago. Of course, he declined my offer, since it is a husband’s obligation to say no to every good idea that doesn’t originate from his own brain. “Maybe I should go to the doctor,” he countered. So dramatic. Give that man an Oscar.

At first I started trying to convince Albert that I knew what needed to be done and that he didn’t need to go to the doctor, but then I stopped. Brene Brown and Brad Reedy host two podcasts that are so full of wisdom and all the things I need to know. Over the course of one month, both of these sages interviewed Harriet Lerner, who blew me away with her sensible, approachable, compassionate teaching. I gobbled up her book, “The Dance of Anger” and gave away copies for Christmas—but only to people who know I hold ZERO ulterior motives when I gift self-help books.

Harriet Lerner’s book helped me identify myself as an “over-functioner,” which means that I need to keep my damned nose out of everyone else’s business and let them make their own choices. So when Albert resisted, I started pushing back, but then I stopped. He’s a big boy. He is capable of making his own choices. If he wants to go see the doctor, that is fine. Thanks for the reminder, Auntie Harriet.

Then this really weird thing that happened. I stopped talking abruptly, and Albert thought I was mad because he wasn’t obeying my commands. He knows that I have been working on my tendency to over-function, so he understood when I told him that I was just correcting myself and that I respect his choices. Then he said, “Do you really think a pile of gauze will work?”

So I reminded him of how he helped me ten years ago.

Me: “Do you remember what you said to me when I was so scared that the bleeding wouldn’t stop?”

He: “Put pressure on it?”

Me: “No.”

He: “Raise your arm above your head?”

Me: “Nope.”

He: “What did I say?”

Me: “You said, ‘You’re not going to bleed to death from your thumb.’”

We have a joke in our family that our dogs don’t help around the house because they have no thumbs. It’s interesting that a single non-functional thumb didn’t stop me from doing much ten years ago, although I did have a pretty hard time getting my hair into a ponytail. Tying my sneakers took some creativity as well.

Albert opened a discussion with our dogs with his newfound sympathy for their thumblessness. But our dogs were adamant that Dad’s injured claw would not preclude him from participating in household chores.

And that, my friends, is a cut and a wrap.

Thank you for reading!